Tapering

Tapering

You may have read my previous blog regarding the Ideal Training & Recovery Model, if not you might want to as it will help you understand why this is important.

The Taper Model. Now you’ve done all you training and improved as much as you can in the given time you need to ensure that you get to your key event in peak physical fitness and form. There are many ways to do this and as with all training there is no one size fits all approach to this.

For those who don’t know a taper is a reduction in training volume and/or intensity that an athlete would do before an event to peak their physical fitness. Typically this is between 1-2 weeks however it can be longer or shorter and will also be influenced by how hard your training has been prior to the taper.

The infographic shows a few different tapers that allow your body time to fully recover and adapt from the stresses of training as described in my previous blogs but without going into reversibility or feeling stiff, stale and sluggish which is a common problem with recovery.

If you take the starting point of the taper somewhere close to 100% of normal training. So day one of your taper is almost always as high as the day before. The end point or day before is far less but very rarely no training at all. How you get there is described by the different lines. None are perfect but each are worth having a go at, although it’s worth having a practise or mini taper prior to a non-key event in case it doesn’t work as well as you’d hope.

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